The present invention pertains to computers and other data processing systems, software and processes and, more particularly, to such a system, program and process for transmitting an input stream.
In a graphical user interface (GUI), applications, processes and data are generally presented as entities depicted on a user interface. Applications include, for example, text editors, databases, file managers, e-mail and instant massaging.
In GUI environments, it is often the case that a user has many entities running concurrently, wherein the entities are depicted as a set of “windows”. Advantageously, the user is able to interact with several separate entities via a single GUI. However, a user can also become disorientated as to which object is depicted by which window.
For example, instant massaging applications invoke a separate window for each conversation thread and the “look and feel” of these windows can appear almost identical to the user. This is disadvantageous, because the user can inadvertently send a message to an incorrect recipient, which can cause disclosure of inappropriate (e.g. confidential or personal) information.
An added complication is that a number of applications seize focus from a current object that a user is working with without warning to the user, for example, Interned sites have pop-up windows displaying advertisements, forms etc. Thus, a user can inadvertently send input to an incorrect object.
A current solution to this problem is a retrieval mechanism (e.g. used in some e-mail systems) that retrieves an input message that has been sent by a user, but that is yet to be sent to the recipient. However, with this mechanism, the onus is on the sender to notice that a message is to be sent to an incorrect recipient and also to invoke the retrieval mechanism. Another solution is to customize entities in order to distinguish between the entities. For example, each window in a set of windows can be customized to have a different color, different font etc.) However, this is not a fail-safe solution as a user can still inadvertently transmit input to an incorrect recipient and furthermore, this solution requires the user to make sense of the various customization.